"I saw the smoke coming up from bottom [of the elevator]," Jan Demczur says. "Your heart start beating faster. We didn't know if anyone was coming to help. Intercom started breaking up. He didn't hear us. No more voice. We just looked at each other, and what you going to do, the smoke coming, we have to do something." One man pounded on the roof. Nothing. Two of them then pried the elevator door open and started kicking the wall. But it was no use. More smoke was now seeping in, and the air was getting hot.

The men knew they had to break through the wall, but no one had a knife or any other tool. That's when Mr. Demczur thought of his squeegee. He took off the handle and started scratching the wall. "He kept working at it with this squeegee," said Alfred Smith, one of the occupants of the elevator. "It was like he was meant to do that… like he had a willpower that we are going to get out of here." The four men took turns and finally dug deep enough that they were able to kick through the wall to a 50th floor bathroom. The men then fled the building, only five minutes before it came crashing to the ground.

Mr. Demczur had only just sat down on a curb to register what had happened when the second tower began to fall. "I looked back and I see antennas going down, and tower start falling," he says. "In this point, I scared. I say I'm gonna die here now, the tower is so tall and I too close. I don't know which way tower gonna fall, but when I saw antenna was being right my direction, I said God I'm dying here. I start faster, I run faster, I run maybe like three blocks. And I keep always eyes behind my shoulder which way the building going. And I see it not going nowhere, just sliding down floor by floor, I just heard the bang bang bang."

"At this point, I was shaking. So pain. I was just pray to God, thank you God, you help me get out, you keep the building longer, get me out from building. But lot of people doesn't make it, and I was worried about people. When I know that lot of people escape but not everybody, I said wow, boy, what's going on here, who did this, for what reason, why they attack the World Trade Center with the civilians working?"